African art in Western collections

Between 1890 and 1918, Western colonial expansion in Africa led to the looting of many pieces of sub-Saharan African art that were subsequently brought to Europe and displayed.[1] These objects entered the collections of natural history museums, art museums (both encyclopedic and specialist) and private collections in Europe and the United States.

The looting of African artworks from their source countries during the 19th Century

Before the Berlin Conference of 1885, traders and explorers to Africa bought or stole art as souvenirs and curios,[2] speading beyond the coast; ivory objects made along African coasts had been collected for centuries, and many were made by Africans for European markets in a style matching European taste, mainly in areas reached by the Portuguese, the Afro-Portuguese ivories. The period dominated by curio collecting, in which objects served as souvenirs, was followed by a period of trophy collecting in which large collections of artifacts (mostly weapons), and animal skins, horns, and tusks from hunting expeditions, were a tangible means of showing penetration, conquest and domination.[2]

Starting in the 1870s, thousands of African sculptures arrived in Europe in the aftermath of colonial conquest and exploratory expeditions. They were placed on view in museums such as the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro, founded in 1878 in Paris, and its counterparts in other European cities.[3] At the time, these objects were treated as artifacts of colonized cultures rather than as artworks and were very cheap, often sold in flea markets and pawnshops.[3]

European collections

The different histories of museums inEurope and the United States affected the collecting and display of African art in both places.[4] European museums typically were founded as state institutions and thus their collections and displays were shaped by national interests. The appreciation of African objects purely as fine art in Europe was largely limited to private galleries in the early twentieth century. In Paris, dealers such Paul Guillaume, Charles Ratton and Louis Carre played a role in the formation of major private collections of African art. The latter half of the twentieth century saw the opening of the first European art museums devoted to collecting and displaying African art, including the Musee Barbier-Mueller in Geneva (1977), the Musee Dapper in Paris (1986),[4] but many if not most general national art museums by then had collections.

British Museum

The Sainsbury African Galleries in the British Museum in London display 600 objects from the greatest permanent collection of African arts and culture in the world. The three permanent galleries provide a substantial exhibition space for the Museum's African collection comprising over 200,000 objects. A curatorial scope that encompasses both archaeological and contemporary material, including both unique masterpieces of artistry and objects of everyday life. A great addition was material amassed by Sir Henry Wellcome, which was donated by the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum in 1954.

The Benin Bronzes were seized by a British force in the Benin Expedition of 1897 and given to the British Foreign Office. As Paula Girshick Ben-Amos, a professor of anthropology and African Studies at Indiana University, states in The Art of Benin, “art of the Benin Kingdom came to public and scholarly attention in the West in 1897 when members of a British Punitive Expedition brought out thousands of objects as war booty.”2

Around 200 of the bronzes were passed on to the British Museum, while the remainder were divided among a variety of collections, with the majority being purchased by Felix von Luschan on behalf of the Königliches Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin (the present-day Ethnological Museum).[6] In 1936, Oba Akenzua II began the movement to return the corpus of objects now known in modern discourse as the 'Benin Bronzes'.

Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro

The Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro was the first anthropological museum in Paris, founded in 1878. It closed in 1935 when the building that housed it, the Trocadéro Palace, was demolished; its descendant is the Musée de l'Homme, housed in the Palais de Chaillot on the same site, and its French collections formed the nucleus of the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires, also in the Palais de Chaillot. Numerous Fauvist and Cubist artists discovered African art at the Trocadéro Museum.[7] Picasso said that this art taught him "what painting was all about", seeing it in the museum's African masks, which had been created "as a kind of mediation between [humanity] and the unknown hostile forces that [surround us]",[8] and to have been influenced by the masks in the forms of the figures in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which eventually led to Cubism.[9][10] Most of the African collection has since been transferred to the Musee du Quai Branly.

African art in ethnological collections

A Kongo drum in the ethnographic collection of the Royal Museum for Central Africa.

Initially, all African art objects were viewed as ethnographic specimens. Notably, during the period of 1890 through 1913, all large museums redefined their public image in terms of an educational prerogative.[1] In response to the debate around the use of the terms curio and curiosity, the League of the Empire in 1904 recommended the "orderly arrangement and the transformation of mere curios into objects of scientific interest by appropriate classification."[1][11] Likewise, as a means of validating the expansion of ethnographic collections, the rhetoric often employed was one of the necessity of conservation and preservation in the face of the inevitable extinction of the producers of the materials culture in their custody (121).

Stewart Culin, curator at the Brooklyn Museum, was the first American curator to display ethnological collections as art objects, not as ethnographic specimens, which he did in 1923. Culin distinguished his installation from those of contemporaneous ethnological collections at institutions such as the American Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in saying that "the objects of Negro art which are displayed publicly form part of museum collections of African ethnology and receive no special attention at the hands of ethnologists... In the majority of these collections their artistic significance is obscured by the wealth of material, and lost, not infrequently, in the efforts made for its elucidation."[12][13]Art/Artifact, an exhibition organized by Susan Vogel in 1988, presented 160 objects of art and ethnography selected from the Buffalo Museum of Science, the Hampton University Museum (Virginia), and the American Museum of Natural History (New York City). All three are anthropology museums founded in the 1860s with distinguished African collections. The exhibition examined the shifting definitions of art and artifact, and dealt with the question of how we look at objects from traditional African cultures whose classification systems differ from contemporary Western culture.

African art and Western Modernism

During the early 1900s, the aesthetics of traditional African sculpture became a powerful influence among European artists who formed an avant-garde in the development of modern art, known as the "Primitivism" movement.[3] In France, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and their School of Paris friends blended the highly stylized treatment of the human figure in African sculptures with painting styles derived from the post-Impressionist works of Cézanne and Gauguin. The resulting pictorial flatness, vivid color palette, and fragmented Cubist shapes helped to define early modernism. While these artists knew nothing of the original meaning and function of the West and Central African sculptures they encountered, they claimed to instantly recognize the spiritual aspect of the composition and to adapt these qualities to their own efforts to move beyond the naturalism that had defined Western art since the Renaissance.[3]

German Expressionist painters such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner of Die Brücke (The Bridge) group, based in Dresden and Berlin, conflated African aesthetics with the emotional intensity of dissonant color tones and figural distortion, to depict the anxieties of modern life, while Paul Klee of the Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) in Munich developed transcendent symbolic imagery.[3] The Expressionists' interest in non-Western art intensified after a 1910 Gauguin exhibition in Dresden, while modernist movements in Italy, England, and the United States initially engaged with African art through contacts with School of Paris artists. These avant-garde artists, their dealers, and leading critics of the era were among the first Europeans to collect African sculptures for their aesthetic value.

New York City progressively positioned itself as a central marketplace for African art.[3] During the years 1915-19, American dealers began promoting African objects as art to a growing group of collectors. Among the dealers, Mexican artist Marius de Zayas (1880–1961) was largely responsible for helping some adventurous modern-art collectors, including Walter and Louise Arensberg, John Quinn, and Agnes and Eugene Meyer, to build their African art collections. During the early 1920s, several American institutions began opening their doors to African art.[14]

Brooklyn Museum

In 1903, Stewart Culin (1858–1929) became the founding curator of the Department of Ethnology at the Museum of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, now the Brooklyn Museum.[13] Culin, a self-taught ethnologist, built the foundation of four curatorial collections for the Museum, acquiring objects representing African, Asian, Native American, and Eastern European cultures. Culin was among the first curators to recognize museum installation as an art form. He was also among the first to display ethnological collections as art objects, not as ethnographic specimens. This approach is evidenced in his exhibition "Primitive Negro Art, Chiefly from the Belgian Congo". The exhibition opened in April 1923, and displayed African objects he had acquired in Europe from dealers.

Barnes Foundation

Albert Barnes was one of the first American collectors to selectively acquire an extensive collection of African sculpture purely on aesthetic merits. In 1923, two years before the Barnes Foundation opening in Merion, Pennsylvania, Barnes wrote, "When the foundation opens, negro art will have a place among the great manifestations of all times."[15] Through his active promotion of the foundation's collection of African sculpture and its aesthetic importance, Barnes himself played a critical role in fostering appreciation of African art in the United States in the early twentieth century.[4]

Museum of Primitive Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Terracotta seated figure from Mali; 13th century; earthenware; 29.9 cm (11​3⁄4 in) high; Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City). The raised marks and indentations on the back of this hunched Djenné figure may represent disease or, more likely, sacrification patterns. The facial expression and pose could depict an individual in mouring or in pain

Founded in 1954 by Nelson A. Rockefeller and Rene d'Harnoncourt, the Museum of Primitive Art was the first art museum exclusively devoted to exhibiting and collecting works of art from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas for their aesthetic value rather than as ethnographic documents or colonial trophies.[16] The museum closed in 1974, and its collection, staff and library were transferred to the Metropolitan Museum of Art according to an agreement made between Rockefeller and the Met in 1969. The Museum of Primitive Art was in many ways an outgrowth of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).[16] It was located directly behind MoMA and was also built on Rockefeller-owned property. Rockefeller was MoMA's president and d'Harnoncourt was its director. MoMA's 1935 landmark exhibition African Negro Art was influential in shaping the director of the Museum of Primitive Art.[16] Today, the Museum of Primitive Art collection is housed in the Metropolitan Michael C. Rockefeller Wing.

Problems of display

Many scholars and curators have debated the efficacy of different modes of display of African art in Western museums. Generally, scholars agree that the Western art museum was, and continues to be, incompatible with the contexts from which most traditional African arts emerged. The following quotation from Kathleen Bickford Berzock and Christa Clarke's introduction to their book Representing Africa in American Art Museum summarizes the reasons for this incompatibility:

"Art museums reinforced hierarchies of value based on media or genre, favoring paintings and sculpture created solely for artistic appreciation. In contrast, the visual arts of Africa encompass not only sculpture in wood and metal but also beadwork, textiles, basketry, and other works of diverse media, all of which may hold equal value for their creators. And while aesthetics may guide the production of art in Africa, often there are other social, religious, or political concerns that inform its design and use. With this range of forms and materials and the different circumstances of creation and use within society, the diverse arts of Africa were not suited to the aesthetic hierarchies and systems of classification established by art museums. Moreover, museum practices of collecting and display emphasized the artist as individual genius, the school of artists working in a similar style and vein, and chronology. Such categorization was not easily replicated with African objects, which were often collected with fragmentary documentation that rarely identified the individual artist or the specific time period of creation."[4]

Post-1980s African Art

Curatorial debate surrounds questions about where boundaries should be drawn between traditional and modern, between African and the African diaspora in the Americas and Europe, and between sub-Saharan and North African art. In certain instances, tradition-based and contemporary works have been exhibited together, a practice that began with the exhibition "Astonishment and Power: Kingo Minkisi & the Art of Renee Stout" at the National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C.[17] However, this exhibition was criticized for suggesting a cultural continuity between pre-modern African art and African-American art today while ignoring crucial cultural differences between these two bodies of work.[18]
The Benin artist Meschac Gaba's installation "Museum of Contemporary African Art" at Tate Modern belies the fact that there is no such thing as a museum of contemporary African art.[19]

Notes

1.^ In 1903, the League of the Empire was founded in England with the aim of bringing children from different parts of the Empire into contact with one another through correspondence, lectures and exchanges. A distinguished group of museum directors and officials headed a sub-committee of the League entitled 'School Museum Committee.'

^Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time and the Beauty that Causes Havoc, New York: Basic, 2001, ISBN978-0-465-01859-8, p. 92: [A]lthough the sharp change in the right-hand demoiselles occurred after Picasso's visit to Trocadéro, . . . . [i]t turns out that African art supported his conceptual approach and convinced him of the deep meaning of geometry as the language of the new art."